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If you’ve used OpenOffice.org Impress to run a slideshow with your laptop plugged into an external monitor or projector, you’ve probably noticed that it prefers to switch the primary and secondary display, showing you the slideshow while it shows your audience the notes and preview of your next slide! This is exactly the reverse of what you want, which is to show your audience the slideshow and let you see notes, the countdown timer, and so on.

This is annoying, but it’s easy to fix. You’ll need to plug your computer into your external monitor, though. It turns out that this setting is embedded in the slideshow itself — it is not a preference in OpenOffice.org — and it is only activated when multiple monitors are detected. Go to the Slide Show/Settings menu…

… and at the bottom of the dialog, under Multiple Displays, choose the correct display for the slideshow to appear on. I don’t have my laptop plugged into an external display, so the choice is grayed out for me:

If you’ve used Microsoft Powerpoint to create “stepping” slides — slides that appear one bullet point at a time — and can’t figure out how to do it with OpenOffice.org Impress, this article is for you.

What are stepping slides?

“Stepping” slides are the only animation or transition effect I allow myself in slideshows. I don’t generally like animations or other distractions; when I give talks, I am always painfully conscious of how much the audience tends to focus on the slides. I’ve seen some research that suggests people’s brains turn off when they look at slides, so I try to minimize that by making as few slides as possible and engaging the audience.

But enough about me, what do you think about my shirt?

Seriously: stepping slides one bullet point at a time is helpful. It lets me pack a lot more onto a slide, so I can build the story around a concept gradually, increasing the mental density of whatever’s on screen. If the whole slide pops up at once, it’s a distraction. If I split it into a bunch of slides, it’s a distraction.

How do you do it with OpenOffice.org Impress?

Don’t search the Help files for “stepping” — I went that route and crashed OpenOffice.org. Strangely, at the moment the search function crashed, I was writing a presentation about search and indexing algorithms!

You have to do it as an animation. One step at a time (no pun intended):

1. First, create a slideshow and add a bulleted list:

   

2. Next, select the list text and choose the “Custom Animation” sub-pane in the right-hand side:

   

3. Click the Add… button in the Custom Animation pane and select Appear, then OK to dismiss the dialog box:

   

4. If your Custom Animation pane is large enough, you’ll see a small preview of the bullet points at the bottom. Notice there’s a mouse-click icon next to the first one, and the “Start” pull-down menu is blank (no selection). At this point, all the bullet points are going to be animated as a unit:

   

5. The last step is to make the animation start upon clicking, and make that apply to each bullet point. Pull down the “Start” drop-down and select “On click”. You should now see a little mouse-click icon next to each bullet point:

   

You’re done! Test your slideshow just to be sure.